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How To Erase Your Mac’s Hard Drive and Reinstall OS X

I’ve been getting rid of my Apple products lately and selling them on eBay. So, I thought I would remind everyone that you need to erase your data and reinstall OS on your computers and devices before selling it off.

Erase the Hard Drive

Select the local drive and click the Erase tab, Format should be set to Mac OS Extended (journaled), the click the Erase button. That will erase all data and reformat the hard disk.

If you want to be extra secure, select Security Options, then select 7-Pass Erase, which meets the US Department of Defense 5220-22 M standard. This does a similar job of securely erasing your drive as DBAN for Windows.

Reinstall Apple OS X Mountain Lion

After that’s done, go back to OS X Utilities and this time highlight Reinstall OS X and click Continue.

Next you’ll get the OS X Mountain Lion screen. Click Continue at the bottom, and on the message that comes up, click the Continue button.

Now agree to the terms of service for the software license.

After that select the hard drive you want to install OS X on. If you only have one drive, it will be selected for you automatically.

Before OS X installs, you’ll need to log in to your Apple Account.

Now you can kick back and wait while OS X reinstalls.

You’re Mac will restart a few times automatically while everything is erased and reinstalled. It can take a while, might want to play some Angry Birds for a while or grab a beer!

After the reinstall, you or the new owner will need to go through the setup process, transfer files, connect to WiFi…etc. After that, you’ll be able to rock the new freshly installed OS X.

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About Brian Burgess

Based in MN, Brian Burgess is Editor in Chief at groovyPost. He also has contributed to other notable tech sites including InformationWeek and How-To Geek. Follow him on Twitter @mysticgeek.

One Response to How To Erase Your Mac’s Hard Drive and Reinstall OS X

Recently did this before selling my wife’s MacBook Pro. It still shows up in the list of devices on her iPad’s find my iPhone app. It also shows the ability to wipe the device. I doubt the new owner would appreciate that however funny it would be.